The internet is awash with examples of people in the US who believe in the craziest things. Even without seeking them out, my casual websurfing throws up so many that I have become somewhat numb to the examples that I find that demonstrate deep stupidity. But once in a while, I come across things that really boggle the mind, the more so when the perfectly normal way that people start out talking give you no warning that they are about to say things that are completely bonkers.
Take this woman who rose to speak at a school board meeting in Kansas where they were debating whether to require students to wear masks.
In just a little over a minute she crammed so many outrageous things that the mind reels. As usual with so many of these people, they claim that children are being abused on a massive scale and that they are the ones trying to save them. She casually says that 800,000 children have ‘disappeared’. It appears that ‘save the children’ has been a good slogan for the QAnon cult to use to lure people on the internet to get more engaged with the wildest conspiracies because who does not want to save children from an awful fate? Let us note that she says she is a mother and from her apparent age, her children must be pretty young. One has to worry about what those children are being taught at home.
This is no idle worry. The problem is that there is no end to the abyss that such gullible people can sink into and the end results can be tragic, as in the case of the man who killed his two young children by stabbing them in the chest with a spear fishing gun because he believed that that they had been infected with serpent DNA by his wife and would grow up to be monsters. So he was saving the world by killing them.
A California surfing school owner who was charged with killing his two children in Mexico is a follower of QAnon and Illuminati conspiracy theories who thought the children “were going to grow into monsters so he had to kill them,” federal officials alleged.
Matthew Taylor Coleman, 40, was charged Wednesday with foreign murder of U.S. nationals in connection with the death of his 2-year-old son and his 10-month-old daughter, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California. Authorities said Coleman confessed to the killings and told the FBI that he used a spear fishing gun to stab them.
…According to the complaint, Coleman said that he knew what he did was wrong but that “it was the only course of action that would save the world.”
“Serpent DNA” is a likely to be a reference to the “lizard people” conspiracy theory, which falsely purports that reptilian aliens secretly run the world and have taken over important positions in government, banking and Hollywood.
The man who exploded a bomb in Nashville on Christmas day last year may also have been motivated by the lizard people theory.
Investigators are exploring several conspiracy theories as potential motives behind the Christmas Day bombing outside an AT&T building in Nashville, Tennessee, including evidence that the bomber believed in lizard people and a so-called reptilian conspiracy, two senior law enforcement officials said Wednesday.
…Specifically, investigators are looking into the suspect’s previous trips to an undisclosed location in Tennessee where he would camp out in his recreational vehicle and, according to the suspect’s statements to others, hunt possible aliens, the officials said.
In addition, investigators are aware of statements the suspect made about an internet conspiracy that powerful politicians and Hollywood figures are actually lizards or other reptiles who have extraterrestrial origins and are taking over society, the officials said.
Voltaire famously said that “Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
The fuller quote is worth reading.
“Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. If the God-given understanding of your mind does not resist a demand to believe what is impossible, then you will not resist a demand to do wrong to that God-given sense of justice in your heart. As soon as one faculty of your soul has been dominated, other faculties will follow as well. And from this derives all those crimes of religion which have overrun the world.”
Once people believe absurdities, they can be utterly ruthless in pursuing the consequences of their beliefs.
“Children don’t disappear. 800,000 children in United States disappeared.” Okay, crazy person.
I can’t help thinking: and would that be so bad? I can’t imagine they could do a worse job of running human society than we human beings are doing
Well, children are being abused on a massive scale. Mostly by parents and guardians, or by institutions that are charged with caring for them. And, yes, a lot are “disappearing” — running away because of abuse, or thrown out of the house for being LGBT or just because they are inconvenient. (Not to mention killed.) There’s plenty of evidence, if you’re willing to look at it. But fixing that would require facing the depth of the problem and facing the number of uncomfortable changes that would be needed to remedy it.
That’s the problem with these conspiracy theories: they pick up on a real problem, but then look for “solutions” or explanations that put the blame on someone else, so they don’t have to admit that they (actually all of us) are themselves a part of the problem.
“We have met the enemy, and they is us.”
“She casually says that 800,000 children have ‘disappeared’.”
This is not that much of an exaggeration.
https://globalmissingkids.org/awareness/missing-children-statistics/
mnb0 you’re an idiot. Check PZ’s post for more details about that number. Not that you care about not posting nonsense.
“God-given” is itself an absurdity, so the quotation is rather ironic.
John @5: Voltaire was a deist. The irony is that pedantic nitpickers like you, to whom context apparently means nothing, are part of the problem.
Rob, deists are goddists no less than theists.
(How you imagine being pedantic is “part of the problem” of people holding absurd beliefs is left to the imagination)